Jasper County Jury Returns $7.7 Million Over Forceps Birth Injury, Payment Set by a Confidential Settlement Range
Won by Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci.
Mary Hunt sued Dr. Larry Clark and Freeman Health System after forceps used during her son's 2016 delivery caused bleeding deep in his brain and a stroke that damaged the left hemisphere. A Jasper County jury found both defendants negligent after an eight-day trial in Joplin and returned $7,688,861.10 on September 17, 2019. Before the verdict came in, both sides had agreed to settle within a range keyed to whatever number the jury chose, so the amount the family actually received stayed confidential.
What happened
Mary Hunt was admitted to Freeman Health System in Joplin on July 31, 2016, to deliver her first child. She had a perforated eardrum at the time, a detail that would matter later, because the defense pointed to it as the reason her doctor reached for forceps.
On August 1, after about an hour and a half of pushing, the baby was close to entering the birth canal. Dr. Larry Clark, who was at the end of a 16-hour on-call shift, told her he was going to help, according to the account Hunt, the baby's father and a friend who was in the room gave at trial. Hunt testified that Clark never said he was using forceps and that she had not agreed to their use.
Her case was that the forceps were not medically necessary, that the labor was progressing normally, and that Clark placed the instrument on the wrong parts of the infant's head and then twisted and pulled hard enough to cause bleeding deep in the brain. That bleed caused a stroke that, in her lead counsel's words to the jury, wiped out the left hemisphere of the boy's brain, the side that governs movement and speech on the right side of the body. Apart from abrasions left by the forceps, nothing was visible from the outside.
The defense disputed the cause. Its expert witnesses offered competing explanations for the brain damage, including that the child had suffered a stroke before he was ever born, and the defense maintained Clark used the forceps to spare Hunt the ear pain that worsened each time she pushed.
By the time of trial the boy had right-sided hemiplegia along with speech and developmental delays. He had not been expected to walk at all. He was walking with a walker and dragging his right foot, and his lawyers told the jury he would always speak with a slur and would struggle to string words into sentences well enough to make himself understood.
The trial ran eight days in Jasper County Circuit Court before Judge Dean Dankelson. Roger Johnson and Tatianya Scholfield of Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci tried the case for the family. Kent Hyde and David Overby of Hyde, Love & Overby defended Clark and the hospital. The jury took about five hours to find both defendants negligent, returning $33,317.66 in past economic damages, $150,000 in past noneconomic damages, $792,967.50 in future economic damages, $4,712,575.94 in future medical damages, and $2,000,000 in future noneconomic damages, a total of $7,688,861.10. The future medical award matched the life care plan the plaintiffs had put in front of the jury to the dollar.
What the jury decided was not the last word on the money. The two sides had already agreed to settle within a range tied to the verdict figure, whatever it turned out to be, an arrangement defense counsel described as taking away the extremes for both sides. The amount the family received under that agreement is confidential. No appeal followed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Missouri Lawyers Media, Oct 31 2019, staffed article by Lawrence Davidson: the full verdict breakdown and $7,688,861.10 total, case number 17AO-CC00332, verdict date Sept 17 2019, Judge Dean Dankelson, defendants Dr. Larry Clark and Freeman Health Systems, the eight-day trial and five-hour deliberation, plaintiffs' counsel Roger Johnson and Tatianya Scholfield of Johnson Vorhees & Martucci, defense counsel Kent Hyde and David Overby of Hyde, Love & Overby, the trial testimony and defense expert theories, and the pre-verdict agreement to settle within a range that kept the paid amount confidential
- 2.Robert Kreisman (Chicago firm unaffiliated with plaintiffs' counsel), blog case summary: corroborates the roughly $7.6 million verdict, Roger A. Johnson as plaintiffs' counsel, and the child's right-sided hemiplegia, speech and developmental delays
More proven verdicts from Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci
All Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci proven verdicts →A Greene County jury awarded $34,107,628 to a boy who suffered permanent brain damage during his 2014 birth at Cox South hospital in Springfield, where escalating doses of the labor drug Pitocin deprived him of oxygen. It was the largest medical malpractice verdict in Missouri in 2021, and because the injury predated the state's 2015 damages cap statute, the noneconomic award stood without reduction.
Kara Hansen was a 16-year-old Riverton, Kansas high school student when Corbin Hamilton rear-ended her 1966 Ford Mustang in Cherokee County on April 9, 2014, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the chest down. After a five-day trial in Cherokee County District Court, a jury found Hamilton fully at fault and awarded Hansen $38.5 million, including $18 million for future medical and life-care costs and $18 million in noneconomic damages. Kansas's statutory cap on noneconomic damages, which applied to claims arising before July 1, 2014 and was not struck down until more than a year after this trial, held that portion of the award to $250,000, putting the judgment that could be entered at roughly $20.75 million. Hamilton carried only a small liability insurance policy, leaving full recovery in doubt.
A Greene County jury found that Dr. Chandria Johnson's delivery maneuvers, rather than the natural forces of labor, caused a brachial plexus nerve injury to a newborn boy identified as K.L. during his November 2014 birth at a Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities facility. Despite six corrective surgeries, the boy was left with permanent weakness in his arm. The jury returned a verdict of $2,348,338.60 against Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities and Dr. Johnson, and because the injury predated Missouri's 2015 noneconomic damages cap statute, the noneconomic award was not subject to a cap.
Marcel Bonetti, 73, a chef who had cooked for Playboy Clubs, actor Kevin Costner, singer Tom Jones and former President Jimmy Carter, died in October 2016, days after an uncomplicated umbilical hernia repair. Two days after the operation he went to an emergency room with severe abdominal pain, and emergency physician Dr. Peter McCarthy diagnosed a common post-operative ileus without ordering blood work, a CT scan or a surgical consult. Bonetti kept getting worse until a CT scan two days later showed bowel ischemia; he was septic by the time he reached emergency surgery and died in intensive care that day. His family sued McCarthy and the emergency staffing company that employed him for wrongful death, and in October 2019 a St. Charles County jury awarded them $1,000,000.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.